Winners of Round Two of the 'Vintage Grand Rapids' contest, but answer comes with an asterisk

Congratulations to Ron Kragt, president of Michigan Natural Storage, and Christopher Reader, senior software developer at Family Christian Stores, for being the first to correctly* answer the yesterday's trivia question.

2. There was at least one taller building proposed (at least in one of its incarnations) that was never mentioned as such on this blog but was very public. (Several readers named it, but could not provide the required blog citation.)

At any rate, the answer I was looking for was Gustave A. Hendricks, who proposed the audacious 34-story Furniture Capital building in the late 1920s. The building was to rise 34 stories and stand 425 feet tall. Unfortunately, the Great Depression seems to have killed the project, leaving us without what would have been a landmark building in the state.

Had it been built (near the site of the current Amway Grand Plaza Hotel tower), the building still would be taller than River House, the current king of the skyline.

The potentially taller building was the never-built 25-story Lyon & Ottawa building designed by Steve Fry at Concept Design Group for a partnership that included Dan DeVos and the Ellis family back in the 1999-2000 era. Lyon & Ottawa was slated to rise up to 485 feet (at least in some versions of the plan), according to Press archives. That obviously would have beaten the Furniture Capital.

I've never written more than a few passing words about the Lyon & Ottawa building on this blog, so there was no link to go with it. That will soon change (think Rendering Graveyard, not resurrection of the project).

But, as bonus for being the first to pull Lyon & Ottawa out of their synaptic dust bin (and prove the need to do a bit more work on the wording of my questions), I'm going to give Eric Vaughn Messing a copy of the book, too. Eric is executive director for Broadway Grand Rapids. Congratulations, Eric.